


Deep Breaths

by Richard_the_Rhymer



Category: RWBY
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, I'm not a medical expert, Survivor Guilt, just writing based on a single night's experience
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 18:34:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29355048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Richard_the_Rhymer/pseuds/Richard_the_Rhymer
Summary: In the aftermath of the attack on the Schnee Manor Blake checks on Ruby and finds that everything over the past two years is finally taking too much of a toll on her friend.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna & Ruby Rose
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29





	Deep Breaths

**Author's Note:**

> I am not a medical expert so don't take anything written here as gospel. My detail of the symptoms is based entirely on my own experience last night. 
> 
> I woke up in the wee hours of the morning with a pain in my chest, thinking I was having a heart attack. After a while of panicking and things getting worse I went in to get some water and woke up my mum, who explained that it sounded like a panic attack she'd had when she was younger. We stayed up for a couple hours and when things died down I went to bed. I woke up and started writing. It still hasn't gone away fully (almost fully, just the dullest ghost of an ache, and no shaking or anything else) but based on a Google search (the most top-tier medical source that never leads anyone wrong) it's an anxiety attack and not a panic attack, since those gradually come on out of nowhere and take a long time to fade.
> 
> Don't do what I did, though. It worked out with me and turned out we were right (apparently genetics really heighten your risk factor for having an attack) but we could easily have been wrong. Have someone take you straight to hospital or dial the emergency helpline if you feel any kind of chest pain because if it's a heart attack then you don't want to be wrong. Of course you should also stay as calm as possible so you don't aggravate the situation.
> 
> On a less morbid note, I was at first going to write about Weiss have one because she's overworking herself in Beacon and have the team look after her, but we're on V8, writing two people is less complicated than four and I couldn't find a way to make the overwork, well... work, despite it being a relatively common cause. Also, Ruby and Blake have been getting more interaction that they were lacking in previous volumes so why not join in?

With Klein seeing to Penny and Nora, Weiss seeing Whitley to his room and Willow off somewhere, Blake figured she should at least see to their leader. After the fight against the hulking, oversized Grimm - _person, it was a person. A faunus. He looked familiar. Did I know him or am I overthinking it?_ \- she had all but locked herself in a room with a map and her scroll, and had barely acknowledged her friends the whole day. Not that Blake didn't understand why. The man inside had silver eyes. Not grey or steel or any other colour or shade, silver. It explained why Tyrian Callows had attacked RNJR in Mistral, certainly, and made Blake want to hit something.

She settled for making herself a cup of tea and her friend some coffee. It was oddly soothing.

Still, upon entering the room Ruby had hidden away in those familiar silver eyes shot up to lock on her when the entire day they had remained fixed on the map. Ruby blinked and took her hand off her chest. She looked ragged, worn even, as though all the mess of the past two years had caught up to her all at once. She was hunched over in her seat, her arms shivering, her face sullen and tired. Her skin was pasty, pallid. Blake couldn't help but just stand there and watch, stunned almost, even knowing she shouldn't be. It was the first time she had ever seen Ruby just let go of the whole eternally-cheerful and hopeful act and admit, without words, that she was just so tired.

Blake snapped herself out of it. "Coffee. Heavy cream and five sugars, like usual."

Ruby looked as though she was actively trying to smile but just couldn't move the muscles. "Thanks." Her voice was quiet, subdued, distracted. She took the offered cup and instantly it slipped through her fingers, smashing into the carpet. The two hovered in awkward silence for a moment. "Sorry," Ruby mumbled, reaching down. 

Blake sat her cup on the desk and dropped down. "No, it's fine." It wasn't, really. Shards of china all over the floor, coffee draining and soaking into the fabric. There was no saving that carpet, so Blake settled for gathering up the shards and setting them on a dresser. Ruby watched her the whole time, hand returning to her chest and holding it there.

Blake's ear twitched. Something was wrong.

Ruby wasn't breathing correctly, and not in the 'I'm worried' way.

In the 'I can't breathe right' way.

"Ruby, what's wrong? Not the Grimm and not Salem, there's something else wrong. What is it?" Ruby took a deeper breath and clutched her chest tighter, and something cold shot through Blake's spine. 

_No way. She's seventeen. She's active and healthy. It can't be..._

Ruby breathed again. "...something's wrong," she admitted, almost silently. Blake perched herself on the desk and took Ruby's hand. _Please tell me. Please._ This couldn't be what she was thinking. No way. "I've got this... pain in my chest, on the right side." Ruby held her fist to the area. "I went to lie down but it kept moving with what side I was lying on. It's like an ache. It's kind of dull, but it's there, y'know? I can't concentrate, I can't sleep."

"How long has this been going on?"

"About an hour. And something just feels wrong, like I can tell something's going wrong."

Blake squeezed the hand and hopped off the desk. "You keep breathing as best you can. I'm going to get you a bottle of water."

"No!" Ruby shouted, or what passed for shouting with her right now. Blake noticed that she remained still, but was panicking. "Don't get Klein. He's busy with Nora and Penny. I'll be okay in a minute."

"I'm just getting some water, Ruby. I promise." _There has to be some other explanation._

After a second Ruby nodded and returned her unfocused eyes to the map.

Blake kept her word and came back with a simple bottle of water. She grabbed a chair and sat next to Ruby, giving her the bottle. Ruby took it with her shivering arms and began sipping. When Blake rolled up the map and tossed it into the corner her unnatural breathing caught.

"What are you doing?"

Blake wrapped an arm around her shoulder. "You can't focus anyway."

Ruby stiffened. "But we don't have time!" She began shaking. "Cinder or Salem or another one of those things could come smashing through the gates at any second! Penny could get taken over again! I need to work, I need to figure this ou-"

Blake's grip tightened. "You need to calm down and rest!" she told her heatedly. 

We don't have ti-"

"You don't have time not to rest! Look at yourself!" She snatched up the scroll and turned on the front camera. Ruby stared, glumly, into her pallid and sickly face with the heavy bags under her eyes and her shivering arms. As the seconds ticked by she took another uneven breath and swallowed.

"Fine. I'm not okay." It was barely more than a whisper but Blake heard it loud and clear. She sighed and put the scroll down. Ruby's breathing still hadn't 'fixed' itself but she was more calm.

"Run me through everything again."

Ruby looked up at her sluggishly, distractedly, then back down and sipped. Her shaking fingers rubbed the bottle. When she spoke it was slowly. "An ache in my chest. It was on my right side but I can feel it in the middle now, too. My arm was hurting for about a minute. I can't breathe properly. I'm shaking. I feel clumsy. My vision was swimming for a little bit. There's just... I get this feeling like something's very wrong. Not everything else, just in general." When she finished she took another sip and leaned into Blake rubbing her back. She closed her eyes and fell silent, except for the short, almost forced breaths.

What was a kind of relief washed over Blake, with everything laid out in front of her. She almost smiled. "Well, I'm not an expert but now that you've put it all out there it doesn't look like what I was worried about."

"Huh?"

"I thought you were having a heart attack." Ruby didn't look surprised, just quietly accepting. "But I've seen something like this before. It looks like you're having an anxiety attack."

"I wasn't panicking when it started."

Blake nodded. "Yeah, it doesn't really need to have to come like a big spark out of nowhere. It can creep up on you when you're calm. You don't even really need to be that stressed, to be honest. It can just happen sometimes. I saw it sometimes when I was with the... well, you know. Sometimes the others would wake up in the middle of the night thinking they were having a heart attack." She deliberately avoided thinking about Adam's reaction when Karl had one. "And we've been under a lot of stress for years now, so it's not much of a surprise that it's happened. And we haven't been getting a lot of sleep for a while. And all that caffeine can't be good for you. And you're in charge here. I know we don't really want to talk about him right now but I'd bet the General's had one or two before. Oz as well, probably more than that. Sometimes it just happens."

Ruby leaned back into the hand again, eyes still closed. She finished off the bottle. "Thanks, Blake. Really." She looked at her and offered what sort of a smile she could.

Blake smiled back and stood up. "I'm going to let Klein know." Ruby opened her mouth to protest. "I could be wrong here. We don't have the equipment to tell properly so it's a matter of wait and see. I'm just giving him a head's up in case this goes south, alright? I'll be back in a few minutes."

True to her word, she wasn't gone long. Klein had thanked her, agreed with her assessment and said to come straight to him if things took a bad turn. She returned with another bottle of water. The coffee had stained the carpet. It's for the best that she dropped it. Last thing she needed was more caffeine. She felt a bit bad for not cleaning it up but there had been more important things to worry about, and it's not like the Schnee family can't replace a carpet, after all. 

Ruby was still sitting right where she had been left, eyes closed and her breathing a little better. She wasn't clutching her chest anymore and she hadn't broken out in a cold sweat, so that was good. She opened her eyes when Blake patted her shoulder.

"Come on. The sofa's more comfortable than this." Ruby had given up resisting. She took the water bottle with a slightly more steady hand than before and moved to sit and practically lounge back in the sofa. Blake sat down with her, saying nothing when she felt a weight on her arm. "You're gonna be okay, Ruby. I promise. Just keep taking deep breaths and keep in mind that you just need to ride it out. It'll go away after a while."

Ruby didn't say anything for a while. When she finally spoke she was so quiet Blake could hardly hear her. "...I don't feel like it will." Blake reached around and rubbed her arm.

"Trust me. It'll go away. Might take a while but it will."

"We don't have time. They could come any second."

"Hey, if they do then we'll deal with it, like we always do."

"...Pyrrha didn't." Blake's breath caught. She looked down at her friend. "She was the strongest fighter we had and she couldn't do it."

"She knew that. She made the choice herself."

"I'm supposed to be the fastest. My semblance is literally to go fast and Weiss and I messed around with the Grimm in the street instead of just heading straight for the fight."

"Then Weiss would have had to fight off all those Grimm on her own while holding the glyphs in place for you. If you'd just gone straight up Weiss would have been jumped and you would have probably died from the fall. You did better than anyone else could. When your power activated all the Grimm in the city died except for the big one. I know you passed out in the middle but we were all just sitting there waiting to be overrun. There were Grimm everywhere and more people kept on dying and that big one just kept spitting out more and we all kind of thought we were going to die." Blake took a deep breath. "Then everything went white and they were gone. They were all gone. And we looked at where the light was coming from and Qrow just turned into a bird in front of everyone and flew right for you."

Ruby didn't look at her.

"You do hear me, right? You didn't save Pyrrha but you did save the rest of us. And if Jaune of all people doesn't blame you when he didn't hesitate to blame Qrow and Oz then I'm gonna come out and say that you don't have the right to blame yourself for Pyrrha's death. You didn't kill her, you didn't get her involved, you were held back, if you'd gotten there in time Cinder would have just killed you too and you wound up saving all of us, so stop it."

Ruby still didn't look at her, but she did let out a small sound.

"And if Cinder shows up you'll blast her like you did last night and we'll do the rest. Same with any Grimm that come. You've gotten a good hold on that power now."

"Took forever to do it tonight. Had to get Crescent to kill that Alpha Centinel. Couldn't do anything to the... thing until it was about to cut Penny's throat." She was shaking again. Her voice was quivering. "...they're gonna turn me into that thing. They're gonna... they're gonna-"

"Do nothing," Blake said firmly. "Salem doesn't get to have you, okay? She doesn't get to make Penny kill herself and she doesn't get to turn you into a monster. It's not happening. We won't let it."

"If Penny didn't need to fight off the hacking it would have thought I was her and it would have taken me back to that whale. I'd be one of those things by now." 

"If it wound up taking you and I couldn't bring it down or tie it to something with Gambol Shroud then we would have come right for you and pulled you out of there." Ruby's eyes widened. "Hey, I used to sneak into heavily-guarded places all the time, remember?" Ruby didn't have anything to say to that. "I promise, nothing's going to take you away. She isn't going to turn you into anything. You just have to blink at Cinder and she runs away. And yeah, people are gonna die, they've already died, but we're gonna save as many as we can, like we always have."

A few seconds passed.

Ruby leaned in. "Since when were you the one giving me nice speeches?"

Blake nudged her. "Well, this one's my second. They seem to be working." The weight on her arm grew.

"Yeah, they are. Thanks. I feel a bit better now. Not great, it's not gone." Her hands were still shaking and her breaths were still small. "But still, I don't feel like I'm gonna collapse any second now."

Blake hummed. "Good. Then you won't mind sitting right here until I say so?"

Ruby huffed. "I'm in charge here."

"Well, I'm forced to relieve you of your command for the next few hours, ma'am."

A few seconds passed by and Ruby let out a deep breath. Blake could feel the sleepiness coming off her in waves.

"Yes, ma'am." After a few silent minutes passed the breathing became even and Ruby completely slumped against her. Blake guided her softly onto her side and tugged the cloak over her front, trying not to snicker when a hand wrapped around it and pulled it in tight. She went out to the window and watched. 

There were Grimm in the streets and in the air and down, down below in Mantle, and a ship was flying towards the whale, but for right now everyone in the manor was resting before they had to go back out into the fight.


End file.
